Detail from The Canal, Amsterdam, 1889, James McNeill Whistler, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow

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Olga Alberta Caracciolo

Title: Baroness de Meyer
Birthname: Maria Beatrice Olga Alberta Caracciolo
Alias: Mahrah de Meyer
Nationality: Portuguese, Italian, French, and American descent
Date of birth: 1871
Date of death: 1930
Category: sitter

Identity:

Donna Maria Beatrice Olga Alberta Caracciola was the daughter of a Neapolitan nobleman, Gennaro Caracciolo Pinelli, Duke Caracciolo, and Marie Blanche Sampayo, daughter of Antoine François Oscar Sampayo, a French diplomat serving in Portugal, and his American wife, Virginia Timberlake.

She lived in Dieppe between 1885 and 1897, and met both Sickert and Whistler there. A socialite, art patron, writer, and fashionable figure, she married first Marino Brancaccio, and later the photographer Adolf de Meyer (1868-1946).

Life:

She was very beautiful, and posed for Jacques Émile Blanche (1861-1942), James Jebusa Shannon (1862-1923), and for her husband, the photographer Adolf de Meyer.

It has been suggested that she was the model for Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple y324 and Study of a Girl's Head and Shoulders y486.

Bibliography:

Blanche, Jacques-Émile, Portraits of a Lifetime: The Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant, 1870-1914, W. Clement (trans. and ed.), London, 1937 . Pakenham, Simona, Sixty Miles from England: The English at Dieppe, 1814–1914, Macmillan, 1967.

'Olga de Meyer', Wikipedia.